New Heaven, New Earth - Thoughts on Final Crisis

"There was a war in heaven...and Evil won."

The idea of the 'crisis crossover' is nothing new in comic books. To those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a threat emerges that's so huge that one hero alone can't handle it, so multiple heroes, often from across different books, will team up to take the bad guy down. This generally makes for an epic story, and helps drives sales across multiple titles as well, so everyone is happy.

At this point, a short history lesson is required.  DC practically invented the concept of the crisis crossover with the 1985 series Crisis On Infinite Earths (hence the term) but they did so for a very specific purpose. At the time, the DC Universe was in fact made up of an infinite number of parallel Earths, each one having it's own heroes and villains who regularly visited and battled each other. This started off as a cool idea, but it also meant that continuity soon spun wildly out of control, with parallel versions of everything and everyone. Thus, Crisis On Infinite Earths aimed to resolve this problem by destroying all the parallel universes, leaving only one 'true' DC universe. Unfortunately, this didn't exactly work and merely left a whole load of loose ends (check Hawkman's wikipedia page for an especially bad example). Subsequently, DC attempted further crossover events to try and resolve these issues. 1994's Zero Hour: Crisis In Time only succeeded in muddying the waters further and 2005's Infinite Crisis actually undid most of the first Crisis by restoring the multiverse, this time in the form of 52 parallel Earths.  As evidenced by its title, DC promised this Final Crisis would be the last of these huge event stories that attempted to reorder the continuity of their comic book world.

The three previous Crises

Got all that memorised? Good. Now ignore all of it.

OK, maybe not, but what is truly remarkable about Final Crisis is how little it cares about continuity, or indeed, about any plot at all. Crossovers have always paid fastidious detail to, and often employed as part of the story, the labyrinth timelines of comic books. Final Crisis on the other hand reads more like a drug trip - incredibly epic and awesome things happen all the time, you're just not exactly sure why.  This shouldn't be a surprise given the book is written by Grant Morrison, a DC veteran who has some all time classics to his name (Animal Man, JLA) but also has a reputation for some very weird and wonderful books (Arkham Asylum, Doom Patrol).  Morrison favours nonlinear narratives, rampant sybolism and the featuring of obscure and forgotten characters, all of which are present and correct within these pages.  This makes Final Crisis an extremely difficult read, even to someone like myself who is intimately familiar with the characters and concepts being discussed. Anyone whose knowledge of DC is not encyclopaedic will  really struggle to make headway.  It isn't helped by the fact that the two series meant to establish events leading up to this crisis, Death of the New Gods and Countdown to Final Crisis were both a) rubbish and b) written without Morrison's knowledge. This means that events in those comics are either ignored or actively contradicted, meaning that this is one story which actually makes less sense in context.

At the base level, the plot is relatively simple. Darkseid, the greatest and most evil of the 'New Gods' has finally discovered the 'Anti-Life Equation' that he's been searching for ever since he was introduced way back in the 70's. With this, he initiates a catastrophic war in heaven which destroys the 'Fourth World' in which the New Gods reside. Darkseid and his forces are victorious but are themselves badly wounded and fall from the Fourth World to New Earth, the primary Earth of the DC multiverse, where he and his minions are reborn in human bodies (Yes, this really does count as 'simple' in comic books). His fall shatters reality and causes Earth to become the centre of a singularity which threatens to consume all of existence.

Essentially then, this is an excuse to unleash apocalypse on an unprecedented scale, as every hero and villain in the universe and indeed, in every universe, battles the forces of Darkseid.  But Morrison, true to his roots, prefers to focus on some of the more minor characters. Superman is removed from the main narrative of the story early on and instead goes on an utterly mind bending trip through parallel universes and versions of himself, meets a bunch of universal guardians called the Monitors (who were established characters, but are portrayed completely differently here than in any previous appearance) and ultimately fights a vampire god and then ends up in the future. In 3D. It makes about as much sense as it sounds. Meanwhile, Batman is captured similarly early on and spends most of the series locked up, although he does have a major role to play near the end.  Wonder Woman is also captured early on, converted into one of Darkseid's warriors and spends most of the book as a faceless grunt.

Pictured - Frankenstein on fire riding an giant  alien wolf, Supergirl, alternate universe Supergirl, a giant robot and two superpowered teenagers. This is one of the less insane panels.

In their place, Morrison assembles an eclectic array of heroes, villains, and characters who may be both or neither.  Pride of place goes to the Super Young Team, an utterly insane group of Japanese teenage superhero wannabes who are very clearly a loving stew of comic and animé clichés.  Also notable are several characters from Morrison's previous series Seven Soldiers, especially the super escape artist Mister Miracle, who is a key plot point.  And Morrison pulls out old, obscure characters like they're going out of fashion - Sonny Sumo, Kamandi, Captain Carrot, Anthro...these are characters who even seasoned comic nerds would struggle to remember.

It sounds like a mess. And it is.  But curiously enough, that's what saves it. The story is so gloriously, ridiculously over the top, it so thoroughly embraces all of the comic book silliness that sometimes seems to have been surgically removed from modern books, that it can't help but be fun. Where else could you see Frankenstein riding a motorbike, sword in hand, decapitating soldiers while quoting Milton?  Where else could somebody commit a murder by firing a bullet backwards in time? An army of Supermen assembled from multiple universes cooking a vampire alive with heat vision? Running a race against Death and winning? All present and correct. It's so fantastically overblown that you want to be swept up in its silliness, to be part of a world where people can unironically say "I'LL DO WHAT I CAN TO PLUG THE HOLE IN FOREVER!"

And there's something else also. These crossovers have always been like this, they're always a mess of characters, concepts and side plots and spinoffs.  What Morrison has understood where many others don't is that sometimes the mythology of a story is far more important that what actually happens.  Take the idea of Darkseid falling from heaven and shattering reality upon landing on Earth. In practice, it's totally ludicrous and makes no sense from a 'scientific' point of view, but the imagery is fantastically powerful and thus works perfectly in a comic book.  Repeatedly, Final Crisis's symbolic power far outstrips the micro level of actual character interaction, really giving you the sense that this is a battle between good and evil that has raged throughout all of time and space and threatens all of reality. Early on, one character promises a "full on, no bull**** twilight of the Gods" and the book delivers in spades. Tales of vampire gods who devour reality itself, and the army of god descending for the final battle spark amazing ideas and legends inside the heads of readers. And when the plot and the mythology occasionally meet, the result is some of the most spine chilling moments ever printed in a comic.  Particularly notable is issue #5, where Darkseid unleashes the Anti-Life equation on Earth and makes half of the world's population avatars of himself, leading to this unstoppably awesome piece of scenery chewing...

"I. Am. The. New. God.
All is one in Darkseid. This mighty body is my church...
When I command your surrender, I speak with three billion voices...
When I make a fist to crush your resistance, it is with three billion hands! 
When I stare into your eyes, and shatter your dreams, and break your heart, it is with six billion eyes!
NOTHING LIKE DARKSEID HAS EVER COME AMONG YOU. NOTHING WILL AGAIN. 
I WILL TAKE YOU TO A HELL WITHOUT EXIT OR END, AND THERE I WILL MURDER YOUR SOULS!
AND MAKE YOU CRAWL AND BEG AND DIE!
DIE! DIE! FOR DARKSEID!"

Over the years, Darkseid had suffered severe decay in his powers and motivations. To see him restored to his postion as a God of Evil, killing whole universes just by existing was a fantastic moment for any DC fan.

Ultimately, it's not much of a surprise that the series ends by becoming almost entirely abstract, and, in a favourite trick of Morrison's, becoming a meta-narrative on the nature of stories themselves.  The final issue is told almost entirely in flashback by various characters, and as reality breaks down around them, the timeline skips all over the place and several incidents are left totally unexplained.  The plot relies on a literal Deus ex Machina (seriously, it's called the Miracle Machine and is capable of granting any wish) to resolve, and Morrison only introduces his true big bad within the final few pages. Said final big bad had only previously appeared or even been hinted at in one of the spinoffs, meaning that if you had only read the main series it was an even bigger WTF moment than usual. There's even a knowing comment by one of the characters at the end, where he notes that "our story has become toxic...out of control...we must end it."  Despite this, the Final Crisis ends on a wholly satisfying note by doing what it has done all along, ignoring the plot minutiae and instead focusing on a single moment in the chaos which encapsulates all it strives to represent.

That's Final Crisis in a nutshell. It's a very difficult book and very often it's not even very good. But it's also something much more interesting than merely competent. It's a brave book, willing to take risks and gamble that the reader is prepared to accept some things without explanation. In return, it delivers a fantastically powerful story that's also a wholly original spin on the mythology of superheroes and the DC universe, while at the same time being a love letter to all that is obscure, silly and awesome about comic books. No, you'd never call it literature, you'd never even call it coherent, but what I would call it is a comic for people who love comics.  And if you've read this far, that probably means you should go out and read Final Crisis too.